Copyright © 2010 Accenture All Rights Reserved. 1Copyright © 2010 Accenture All Rights Reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.

Technology design for usability

in everyday life

Ana C. Andrés del Valle

Accenture Technology Labs

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Introduction

Our technology R&D approach

Healthcare: The Persuasive Mirror

Corporate collaboration: Accenture Distributed Network project

Entertainment: the novel TV experience

Discussion

Outline

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The engineer approach …

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… versus the designer approach

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The prototype

The testing application

Healthcare:

The Persuasive Mirror

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Approach

Study of the concept of captology

Analyze the user scenario to prove the hypothesis

Develop the prototype to prove that the idea is feasible

Cooperate with external medical entity to rethink the approach from a clinical test perspective

Results

A firm verification that the technology solution is feasible

Uncertainty about the usability of the mirror prototype

And scientific support to continue exploring the captologyapproach to the healthcare challenge

The approach and the results healthcare

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Corporate collaboration

Accenture Distributed Collaboration Network

7 Whitespace

ACCT – Ice T

Advanced Sharing Interfaces

Multiple HDVC

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Results

High-definition VC is mainstream and encouraged by CIO regardless of well

humans are using it. No more work in optimizing it but effort in adopting it

White space prototype development was stopped. Accenture does not focus

on collocated work, difficult to set testing environment beyond the labs

Accenture Coordination and Collaboration Tool was tested but not deployed

Ice T was tested and it is currently deployed as beta waiting for CIO support to

develop version 1.0

The approach and the results

$125,000

cost

red

uct

ion

per

per

son

/per

ye

ar

positively impacted productivity (# employees) 180,000

Level of impact(savings/person versus people impacted)

$257,000 yr

cost

mai

nte

nan

ce o

f eq

uip

men

t

# people hosted in the environment

+501 3 10

Level of impact (cost versus capacity)

corporate collaboration

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Entertainment

The Novel TV Experience

To develop of cross platform Web2TV consumer experiences

Reinvigorate the TV

as a marketing channel

To bring forward the uniqueness of the TV-user context

Synchronizing Web

and TV useKelly’s new car…

Chat

(time shifted) Feed AggregationDual channel experience. User goes to Xsync.com and gets a synchronized experience on both TV and PC.

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Approach

Market study of novel technologies

Discussions with Accenture clients in the media and entertainment industry

Discussion with Accenture industry teams to understand their positioning in the market. We found new angled that had not explored

Designed and developed technical prototypes that exemplify those angles

Results

Two fully working prototypes that enable us further testing on the technical side (scalability) and human side (usability)

The approach and the results entertainment

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Better one technico-usability approach than none

I have not been able to use a single universal approach

The technical requirements constrain the usability testing possibilities

In corporate research, a usability strategy should be defined from the start and never neglected, no matter what

Conclusion

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“On Academic Knowledge Production”Jon Kolko

Interactions Café. ACM interactions Vol XII.5 (Sept+Oct 2010)

Thank you

Any questions?